Almost exactly three years ago, I wrote about why OSNews was no longer OSNews: the alternative operating system scene had died, and OSNews, too, had to go with the times and move towards reporting on a new wave of operating systems - mobile, and all the repercussions that the explosion of smartphones and tablets have caused. Still, I was wondering something today: why aren't we seeing alternative operating systems on mobile?

There's no standard hardware to target, for a start. Even if you can identify certain platforms that might qualify as "standard" they're either locked down, or don't have specifications or open drivers for various bits of their hardware. Where they do, the hardware is usually very specialised with no room to try different things: for example most mobile video hardware expects the OS to interface to it as some form of OpenGL ES. On top of that, a large part of a phones function is radio and managing the radio interface is hard, and boring.